Caroline Pollock, MBA’19

Midway through Caroline Pollock’s year-long Smith Full-Time MBA program, she found herself part of a team vying to win a finance-based case competition. As an industrial engineer who’d spent nearly a decade running tactical and infrastructure program support for the Canadian Armed Forces, nothing about the fiscal focus of the challenge was in her comfort zone. “It wasn’t anything I’d naturally gravitate towards,” she reflects, more than six years later. “But it was such a cool experience to learn from the team, to pitch an audience and to put myself out there.”

It was exactly the kind of stretch exercise Caroline had enrolled in the MBA to experience. She’d been contemplating a career change for some time: “I got to an inflection point where I wasn’t really loving where I was at,” she explains. “The idea of doing something different began to nag at me.” She wanted to gain deeper knowledge about a broader range of business topics to help her sort out her next steps. Plus, as a believer in continuous learning, she was eager to push the limits of her capabilities. 

Caroline’s initial approach was to dabble in some part-time business courses, which lit up her brain, but multitasking between her day job and her studies left her feeling frustrated and spread too thin. So, when she came across Smith’s full-time program during a visit to an MBA fair, the intensive, all-in structure seemed exactly what she needed. “I’ve found I’m most effective when I can fully go for things,” she says.

The timing wasn’t perfect—Caroline’s kids were very young, and her husband (who also was, and remains, employed by the CAF) was pursuing his own Master’s degree full-time—but she also knew it never would be. “I didn’t want to keep kicking it down the road, and then never do it,” she says. She wasn’t intimidated by starting something new: As half of a military couple, she’d relocated and pivoted more in 10 years than most people do in a lifetime. Nor was she bothered by the workload. After a clear-eyed assessment of the logistics with her husband, she decided to go for it: “We signed up for some short-term pain for long-term gain.”

That’s how she ended up on the train to Kingston in January 2018, freshly released from the CAF, to start a year-long regimen: Weekdays on campus to study, weekends back home in Toronto to tend to everything else.

Caroline’s campus experience proved to be equal parts interesting, challenging, and rewarding. She’d come in expecting a steep learning curve, and did indeed encounter one—but she quickly discovered that her background had prepared her for it better than she expected. The team-based structure of the curriculum gave her confidence: “That really resonated with me,” she explains. “In the military, you’re never working in isolation: You solve problems as a unit.” (She particularly appreciated the care that had gone into ensuring her group comprised a cohesive mix of different skills and experiences: “We developed really tight relationships and became really effective as a team.”) Furthermore, she was surprised to find elements of her past work experience reflected in several parts of the curriculum. “The concepts were familiar,” she says. “Strategic business planning was similar to the operational planning we’d done in the military, and marketing concepts weren’t too far off from intelligence gathering.”

As the months passed, Caroline began seriously considering her reinvigorated career prospects, gravitating towards opportunities in consulting and operations management. But then, another pivot: her husband was posted to Gagetown, New Brunswick—far from the Bay Street corridors she’d been imagining. “Suddenly, I had to figure out how I’d navigate my post-MBA career in Fredericton, where I didn’t know anyone,” she says. That’s when the Smith network kicked in: A classmate from New Brunswick introduced her to a former colleague, sparking a rapid series of connections that led to Caroline lining up a job with provincial business accelerator Opportunities New Brunswick before graduation.

Seven years, three cities and more than a half-dozen positions later, Caroline and her family are now based in Ottawa, where she leads major capital infrastructure programs at Defence Construction Canada (a Crown corporation that supports the building projects of the Department of National Defense). It’s tough and fulfilling work, but she rarely encounters a situation that her education or network can’t help her resolve. “My MBA made me much more savvy about business and financial concepts,” she says. “It was a proper gateway to prepare me for a whole new career.”